Gripe to Ed

Ed Markel here. My menopause stories don’t seem very funny to me. I remember it being a very scary time for both of us. She would go out somewhere and come home in tears.

Once she got lost on her way to work at a job she had worked at for over a year. This was in the days before cell phones, so she could not call anyone and ask for directions. She was just terrified. Another time, she came home after being gone for hours and scaring me half to death and said that she had found herself standing in the middle of a grocery aisle, just staring at the things that were on the shelves. She had no idea how long she had been standing there.

She used to worry that she was having early onset Alzheimer’s Disease and was terrified she would lose her memory altogether.

Sometimes we were able to see the humor in this craziness. She used to have occasional days in which she said she felt “stupid,” that she just was not able to think. She once called in to work—she was a social worker at a nursing home—to tell her boss that she couldn’t come to work because she was too stupid to work that day. Her boss said, “I don’t think I have ever had anyone call in stupid before.” Life was like that.

What’s your story? Share in the comments. And, really, it’s okay to be funny or gripe. Bring it on!